ALEC’s Board of Scholars Program honors those whose distinguished work and dedication to market-based policy innovations have been, and continue to be, invaluable to ALEC and its membership. This convergence of ALEC with the great policy thinkers will further ALEC’s mission of expanding free markets, limited government, and individual liberty. The following are members of the ALEC Board of Scholars:

Dr. Arthur B. Laffer

Arthur B. Laffer is the founder and chairman of Laffer Associates, an economic research and consulting firm. As a result of Dr. Laffer’s economic insight and influence in starting a worldwide tax cutting movement during the 1980s, many publications have named him The Father of Supply Side Economics. He is a founding member of the Congressional Policy Advisory Board, which assisted in forming legislation for the 105th, 106th and 107th Congress. Dr. Laffer served as a member of President Reagan’s Economic Policy Advisory Board for both of his two terms. In March 1999, he was noted by Time Magazine as one of “the Century’s Greatest Minds” for his invention of the Laffer curve, which has been called one of “a few of the advances that powered this extraordinary century.” He has received many awards for his economic research including two Graham and Dodd Awards from the Financial Analyst Federation. He graduated from Yale with a Bachelor’s degree in economics in 1963 and received both his MBA and Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University.

Victor Schwartz

Victor Schwartz is a partner in the Washington office of the Kansas City-based law firm of Shook, Hardy, and Bacon, LLP, and chairs its Public Policy Group. He began his career as a professor and then acting dean of the University of Cincinnati College of Law. He currently serves as adjunct professor and a member of the Board of Visitors for the school. For over two decades, he has been co-author of the most widely used torts casebook in the United States, “Prosser, Wade and Schwartz’s Torts” (10th ed.). He is also author of the leading text, “Comparative Negligence,” and so-called “Guide to Multistate Litigation.” Mr. Schwartz assisted the drafting of the federal Uniform Product Liability Act and the Risk Retention Act. He co-chairs ALEC’s Civil Justice Task Force and received ALEC’s Private Sector Member of the Year Award in 2003. He also serves as general counsel to the American Tort Reform Association.

Dr. Richard Vedder

Dr. Richard Vedder is a Distinguished Professor of Economics at The Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. He has written extensively on labor issues, authoring such books as The American Economy in Historical Perspective and, with Lowell Gallaway, Out of Work: Unemployment and Government in Twentieth-Century America. Vedder has written more than 100 scholarly papers published in academic journals and books, and his work has also appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines including the National Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Investor’s Business Daily, Christian Science Monitor and USA Today. Vedder has been an economist with the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, with which he maintains a consulting relationship. He has served as the John M. Olin Visiting Professor of Labor Economics and Public Policy at the Center for the Study of American Business at Washington University in St. Louis and has taught or lectured at many other universities.

Bob Williams

Bob Williams is the Founder and Senior Fellow of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, a public policy organization in Olympia, Washington, dedicated to the advancement of individual liberty. He is known as a national expert in the areas of fiscal and tax policies, election reform and disaster preparedness. He received his Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Pennsylvania State University. Bob worked as a GAO auditor of the Pentagon and Post Office before moving to Washington state where he served five terms in the Washington state legislature and was the 1988 Republican nominee for governor.